The car they pick to trace that move over NS is hit with three “bad luck” events. First, the car gets shoped in New Orleans. There’s 6 days of dwell there. Why does it take 6 days to repair a loaded car? Good question!
Second, the car missed it’s connection in Linwood. This is truly bad luck. Linwood is one of NS’s better performing hump yards. They make this particular connection better than 90% of the time. There’s another day.
Then the car spends 5 days in Danville after NS tells the customer “your car is here, when do you want it?” It’s a private cars, so no constructive placement is reported. It’s typical for these cars to sit at Danville anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.
If you back out those 12 days of dwell, the average speed goes up to: 6 mph! It’s better than the 2.5 mph actual, but it lets you know why RRs don’t get too excited about the difference between operating at 50 mph or 70 mph.
Don, I’ve seen those “hard-luck” reports a number of times on our railroad. I see late cars more often, but I think it’s because they call attention to themselves in my case. I agree with you that the problem isn’t usually mainline train speed.
Could you please explain the term “constructive placement” to me? I’ve dealt with it nearly every day since UP took us over, but we treat the “CP” cars just like we do other cars for the same destination.
That was one of the more interesting maps in quite awhile. Following the cars was very informative.
Was it strange that 3 of the 4 cars were bad ordered? Certainly, that cannot be a normal sample.
Carl, any idea of why tank car A would have gone to the A&S then to CSX, instead of bypassing EStl? Perhaps because of the holidays? It sure makes sense, at least comparing the two tank cars, for it to go via Salem.
Constructive Placement is done when a customer can’t take a car for placement. Normally, it’s done to move the burden for paying car hire from the RR to the customer once the car arrives at the destination serving yard.
In this particular case, the car wasn’t CP’ed because it is a private car and the RR isn’t paying car hire. From the looks of it, this particular customer tends to have his loads held at the serving yard. Perhaps he doesn’t have much space at his plant to unload, or he keeps a lot of inventory in the rail cars because of lack of storage space or inconsistent service.
There was a derailment between Bellvue and Buckeye (Troyton, OH) and at least one 17R was diverted to Elkhart. The rest have been terminated short at Bellevue.
Thanks for the CP explanation, Don–it makes sense. In our case, we’re doing the right thing because there are jobs or tracks between us and the industries in question that can take up the slack, as it were.
Ed, as for the car being routed via ALS, it’s hard to say why that first tank wasn’t routed via St. Elmo. It looks like it would have saved time. It could have been a prescribed routing, either from the shipper or from CSX (some of the routings we get for CSX cars make me roll my eyes–we had a unit train of empty fertilizer cars, all going to the same Florida destination, that we had to break up for three different classifications [Cincinnati, Cumberland, and BRC, in that case], and there have been numerous instances of us humping the same car about 12-15 times in the same month, because CSX sends it to us and we have to send it back to them because we don’t go where the car wants to–every other day we get it, almost like clockwork!).
But I think you have to go with what the article itself said, below the map: “Their trip plans were likely determined based on factors in place when their journeys began, such as holidays, yard congestion, and track maintenance curfews.”
Another possibility for the EStL tank car is that it was miss-blocked upstream and went out of route.
Yet another is that there is day of week variable service. That is the Salem connection is only there 5 days a week and the other two days, cars move to EStL.
Yes, it absolutely could have been put in the wrong block, possibly right in Houston (notice that it left there on a train destined for the A&S–that in itself isn’t conclusive, depending on what other blocks that train might carry…I don’t know). Don could also be right about the day of the week causing the change. It looks like tha car could have spent two more days in Texas, if that’s the case (in addition to the six it had already spent–what was with that, I wonder) and gotten to CSX at the same time.
I hate seeing in-wrongs at work. My “batting average” isn’t the best, but it’s among the best. If we mis-classify a car, the hump is expected to dig it out and put it right. It may be a different story if “Omaha” changes the routing on a car after it’s been humped. The thing I hate–with a passion–to hear is that a mis-classified car is going to “go for a ride”. This is usually being said by a conductor who has no clue where one destination is in relation to another. By coincidence, I had a fairly animated conversation with my conductor about a car for the A&S that he sent to North Platte instead–he has no clue where the A&S is, and his brother is an officer!
Truly a fascinating map and even more fascinating discussion. Thanks Don and Carl for some inside info on this.
I have stated before that I have evolved into what I consider to be an “economic railfan” in that I find the commerce aspect of railroading to be much more interesting at this stage in my life than it was years ago. Thus, the routing protocals for freight, plus the costs involved for doing so is very interesting.
My previous career in LTL trucking had many of the same issues as far as routing of freight, costs involved with service, etc. I really compare LTL trucking with single car railroading. Very similar in a number of ways.
Don, when I ask about new trains on NS, it is to try and figure out what is causing this to occur. What type of traffic patterns or operational issues are leading to new trains being established. I know from reading in a past Trains article that NS has quite a system for analyzing single car movements. For example, something has just caused the 110 and 150 trains to be routed via Ft Wayne to Chicago now, instead of what I assume was thru Elkhart.
Carl, we might have discussed this previously, but do you receive routing instructions on all cars to be handed off to the other class ones? You mentioned the unit train getting broken up into three blocks, but what about if you had a 50 cars for misc CSX points in the east? Does CSX instruct you on each of the 50 cars or is there a “routing guide” for each railroad station? I can see how things change on a daily basis with ebbs and flows on the volumes of freight, particularly when there is pressure to move cars thru Chicago, St. Louis or other choke points.
Ed, we would seldom receive a block of cars for mixed CSX destinations like that. Had that unit train not “needed” switching, I doubt it would have been humped at all (and we should have just sent it all on to the Belt). But what happens is that I am informed, on my hump sheet, of the block we’re supposed to be sending the car to, and the sheet usually shows a destination (lots of people ignore this–I use it to get an idea of how things should run). Cars for CSX usually come at us mixed in with everything else we have to sort.
North Platte used to (it might still) make up a block for CSX to classify at Willard. It still makes up a solid Selkirk train that we don’t usually touch. I don’t know what, if anything, North Platte makes up for travel through CSX gateways other than Chicago (no doubt something for St. Louis and/or Memphis).
I recently observed a UPRR train taking 7 hours to go some 200 miles from Rochelle to Ft. Madison via the new connector @ Edelstein. That averages a whopping 30 miles per hour vs a truck 65 or 70 per hour? [%-)]
That’s 1 truckload vs. approx 150 or more equivilent truckloads in 7 hours. I don’t think that poor trucker (or two if you want the working hours to be the same) could make it 150 times in 7 DAYS[:O].